Neeson melds action, intimacy in 'The Grey'
★★★
The debut of a new action movie starring Liam Neeson is becoming an early-in-the-year movie tradition.
Taken, featuring Neeson as a hell-bent dad out to rescue his daughter from sex slavery, debuted in January 2009. Unknown, starring the Irish actor as an American in Berlin who’s lost his memory, splashed across screens in February 2011.
Both Taken and Unknown were hits. They’re also unusually good movies, despite being released early in the year, a notoriously dry period for quality films. Taken and Unknown furthermore established Neeson, a man in his late ’50s, as a late-blooming action star.
Even as a Taken sequel is in production, Neeson fights again in The Grey. In a tale of men versus beasts, odds are against a squabbling crew of oil-riggers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. It’s winter and the crash site is so remote that a speedy rescue mission won’t happen, at least not before the survivors probably have perished.
Joe Carnahan, a writer-director whose earlier projects include The A-Team, Smokin’ Aces and Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, has the right stuff for The Grey. He strips things down to the primal. Men who possess only the most primitive of tools must defend themselves against wolves defending their territory against perceived two-legged invaders.
Amidst the wolves’ stalking of humans who are struggling to survive, there’s still room for some poetry. The screenplay by Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers allows Neeson — a real actor cast in an action film, not an action star cast in an action film who needn’t do much acting — transcendent scenes as a man who’d lost his will to live in the hours before he must do or die in the wilderness.
Dreamy, quiet scenes of Neeson and his wife (Anne Openshaw) bathe the couple and the audience in a warm serenity that’s the polar opposite of his Alaskan nightmare. As he writes to her, his words are heard in voiceover. “I don’t know why I’m writing this,” he says. “I know I can’t get you back.”
Neeson becomes the party’s resident wolf expert after the plane carrying the oil-rig workers plunges to snow-covered ground. The descent is harrowing, the aftermath horrific, all of which is depicted by unusually realistic imagery.
Back at the oil-rig camp, before the crash, Neeson worked as the operation’s designated sniper, patrolling the camp’s outskirts, watching for wolves stalking human prey. In another of the movie’s poetic moments, he places his hand, with a kind of reverence, on the body of a dying wolf he’s just shot.
Later, in the wilderness, there’s almost no time for reverence. Neeson steps forward to be the humans’ alpha male, in an altruistic rather than egotistical way.
Just as Neeson’s character is a credible, living personality, the men in his party also become fully formed, distinct individuals. Such depth of writing, quite an accomplishment within the shorthand of a screenplay, lets the audience come to know these men who, despite their flaws, inspire empathy.
As has become something of a fashion, The Grey doesn’t end neatly. Nevertheless, the film’s absorbing journey takes precedence over its ambiguous destination.